COLT (A Nicholas Colt Thriller)

by Jude Hardin

  “Nicholas Colt. I’m a private investigator.”

  I heard a distant male voice say something about calling the cops, and then I must have passed out. I woke up two hours later, but I wasn’t at the PEAK house anymore.

  I was in the emergency room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  They didn’t admit me to the hospital. They treated me and let me go. No broken bones, but my right arm was badly bruised and the doctor said there might be some nerve damage. She told me to keep it in a sling for a few days and to make an appointment with my primary care physician. Like any of that was going to happen. She obviously didn’t know me very well.

  A pair of FBI agents spoke to me at length while I was in the ER, and I told them everything I knew. I told them about following the wrong trail, about the Five Points Posse motorcycle gang and Shelby Spelling the ex-girlfriend. I told them about John Patterson the roommate murdering Stephanie Vowels the half-sibling in an effort to frame Trent Appleton the sperm donor. They took a lot of notes and told me they would be in touch if they needed any additional information. One of them gave me a business card with a cell phone number written on the back of it. Strictly confidential, he said, only to be used if I suddenly remembered something else pertinent to the investigation.

  I didn’t say anything about breaking into Klein Fertility. They didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell.

  “I’m assuming Everett’s in custody now,” I said.

  The one named Parker looked at the one named Sinclair. Sinclair shrugged.

  “He got away,” Parker said. “We’re still looking for him.”

  “He was supposed to meet someone at an airstrip,” I said. “From there, he was going to Mexico, and then to the Philippines.”

  “Do you know where the airstrip is?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where they were supposed to land in Mexico?”

  “No.”

  Sinclair took a sip from the Styrofoam coffee cup he’d been carrying when he and Parker walked in. He made a sour face, as if he wanted to spit it out.

  “Somehow, Everett left the fraternity house before the police arrived,” he said. “We talked to some people who’d been at the party, but nobody seemed to know anything. Apparently he was wearing a mask that belonged to his roommate, and everyone thought—”

  “That he was John Patterson,” I said.

  “Right. And it might be that some of his fraternity brothers are covering for him. If that’s the case, there’s not much we can do about it. And if he’s already left the country, we’ll probably never find him.”

  “What about Patterson?”

  “He’s in surgery,” Parker said.

  “He’s alive?”

  “He was hanging by a thread when EMS got there. They had to perform CPR in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. He’s in critical condition, but right now it looks like he’s going to pull through. We’ll be watching him closely, and of course we’ll have a slew of questions for him when he wakes up. If everything you’re telling us is true, he’s going to be facing quite a few charges. First degree murder being at the top of the list.”

  I nodded. I was happy that I hadn’t killed Patterson. It would have been ruled self defense, but it would have weighed on my mind for a long time. I was glad he was alive, and I was glad he would be facing charges for the murder of Stephanie Vowels. When you got down to it, she was the real victim in this whole ordeal. Everything else could be fixed, or at least patched up well enough to keep on moving down the highway.

  But you can’t fix dead. You just can’t do it.

  Apparently, Everett had gotten away with accessory to murder, and he’d gotten away with twenty million dollars. I wondered what life would be like for him now. Maybe he would live like a king in the Philippines, the way he and John Patterson had planned. Or maybe he would be a nervous wreck, constantly looking over his shoulder, wondering how much longer it would take for the authorities to catch up to him, wondering if today would be the day.

  Everett was an international fugitive now, probably destined to be on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. To me, that would be a miserable existence, worse than almost anything. I wouldn’t have traded places with him, not for all the money in the world.

  It was three o’clock in the morning by the time I left the hospital. I thought about calling Laurie, but I didn’t want to wake her. She probably would have insisted on driving to Gainesville to pick me up, and it just wasn’t necessary. I was fine except for my right arm. There was no reason I couldn’t drive myself home.

  I took a taxi to where I’d parked the Caprice. I climbed in and started it and drove up to the PEAK house and pulled into the gravel lot in back. Everything was dark and quiet now. No more loud music, no more drinking and laughing and mingling and flirting. No more fun of any kind. Police cars and ambulances tend to have that effect. They tend to be party poopers. I wondered about the two guys I’d lectured on the sidewalk earlier, wondered if anything I said had sunk in. Probably not. At any rate, I was happy their night had been ruined.

  I sat there and stared at the back of the house for a while. Something was still bothering me, and it had to do with automobiles. Everett’s BMW had been stolen from my lot on Lake Barkley. Someone had managed to defeat the alarm and get it out of there without being noticed. I’d been thinking professional thief all along, but there was another possibility. Someone with a spare set of keys could have taken the car. Someone Everett trusted. A third accomplice.

  Everett Harbaugh and John Patterson would have needed a fair amount of cash up front to arrange for an airplane to Mexico, and the BMW would have fetched around thirty grand on the black market. Plenty to finance their escape. Everett could have taken the car himself, but he didn’t want to risk being seen. He wanted everyone to think he’d been abducted. Patterson could have taken it, but that also would have been high risk. If Patterson had been caught, his and Everett’s room at the PEAK house would have been searched, and the whole scheme would have collapsed like a house of cards.

  I thought about it some more. I supposed it could have gone down a hundred different ways. It was possible that Everett had simply handed over a set of keys to a professional car thief in exchange for a satchel full of cash. Or maybe he’d bartered with the airplane pilot. Maybe he’d offered the high end convertible in exchange for a hop to Mexico. That would have been a pretty nice paycheck for any crooked flyboy, especially for only one day’s work.

  The case of Everett’s missing BMW would probably remain unresolved, and considering everything else that had happened, I was OK with that.

  But there was another automobile on my mind.

  Everett had taken me hostage, and he’d planned on forcing me to drive him to the airstrip in Patterson’s car. That obviously hadn’t happened, and Everett obviously hadn’t taken the car himself.

  I knew this because I still had the key.

  So there must have been a third person, and this person—whoever it was—had provided transportation for Everett to get away from the PEAK house before the cops came.

  I reached into my pocket, pulled out the key and looked at it. There was a fancy little L embedded into the rubber grip, and for some reason it made me think of an old Jimmie Rodgers song called “T for Texas.”

  T for Texas.

  L for Lexus.

  And there was a gold one parked in the gravel lot behind the PEAK house.

  I got out and walked over to the car and tried the key, just to be sure. It worked.

  I walked back to the Caprice, sat and stared at the back of the house some more.

  Thought some more.

  And then it came to me.

  I started the car and drove out to the highway and whipped into the first twenty-four-hour store I saw, a Walgreen’s pharmacy just south of Woof-A-Burger. There was a payphone out front. I jammed some coins into it and punched in the number for FBI Special Agent Richard Sinclair, and he answered on the first ring.
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  “This is Nicholas Colt,” I said. “I just thought of something.”

  “What is it, Colt?”

  He sounded sleepy. Understandable at four o’clock in the morning.

  “I think Bradley Harbaugh was in on it,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Everett’s father. Not his biological father, but the man who raised him. He’s an attorney.”

  “OK. I know who Bradley Harbaugh is. But what makes you think—”

  “Pre-nups,” I said. “Prenuptial agreements. Do you know who Bradley’s married to?”

  I heard some papers rustling.

  “I have her name here somewhere,” Sinclair said.

  “Jill Drake. A little over a hundred years ago, her great-great grandfather started a company called Drake Foods. When her mother died two years ago, Jill inherited a fortune. Some of the reports I’ve read estimate her net worth at over a hundred million dollars. With that kind of money on the line, I can almost guarantee you there was a prenuptial agreement when Jill and Bradley got hitched twenty-some years ago. Her family would have insisted on it. If things ever went wrong with the marriage—which things have a habit of doing—there was no way an in-law was going to walk away with a big fat share of the company.”

  “OK. So?”

  “So Jill filed for divorce a couple of months ago. August fifteenth, to be exact. If there’s a pre-nup—which I’m sure there is—then Bradley is screwed. He won’t get any part of that hundred million.”

  “He’s an attorney. I’m sure he’ll do OK on his own.”

  “OK isn’t the same as mega-rich,” I said. “He was probably planning on retiring soon and sailing up and down the coast in a super-yacht or something. Now he’ll be forced to keep working for a measly hundred grand a year, or whatever it is he makes, and he’ll grow old in a one bedroom condo with a couple of cats and a big screen TV like the rest of us.”

  “So you think he orchestrated this whole thing for the twenty million?”

  “I’m almost sure of it. Think about how complex the scheme was. Could two nineteen-year-old fraternity guys have put all that together? Would they even have known how? Would they have had the connections they needed to establish an offshore bank account? To get safely out of the country on an illegal flight? I don’t think so. It’s highly unlikely. But Bradley Harbaugh did have the connections. He’s a defense attorney. High profile. He deals with criminals on a daily basis. He was the only person in this whole tangled web with the savvy and the motivation to pull this thing off.”

  “But I talked to him earlier,” Sinclair said. “He was at home.”

  “Of course he was at home. He needed to be there to play the game while everyone still thought Everett had been kidnapped. He needed to go through the phone surveillance with you guys, and he needed to talk to the media and all that. His own little dog and pony show. But now that the money has been transferred, he can catch a flight and meet up with his son in Mexico. From there, they’ll go to the Philippines together. Or wherever. They might have changed that part by now.”

  “It’s an interesting theory.”

  “I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure that’s the way it went down. It’s all pretty ingenious when you think about it. The money was supposed to have been split three ways, but now it’s just Everett and Bradley. Father and son. I’m sure they’re heartbroken that John Patterson won’t be joining them after all.”

  “You might be on to something,” Sinclair said. “I’m going to put a team together, and we’ll make a trip over to the Harbaugh residence.”

  “You better do it soon,” I said. “I doubt if he’ll be home much longer.”

  After we hung up, I walked into Walgreens and bought a universal phone charger and a bottle of Advil and a Sprite. I swallowed four of the tablets, plugged my cell into the rental car’s cigarette lighter, and headed for Lake Barkley.

  I called Laurie on the way, got voice mail. I told her to meet me at Kelly’s Pool Hall in Hallows Cove at two o’clock in the afternoon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  My Airstream was cleaner than it had been in years. The company I hired had done a great job. My laptop was ruined, and the tires on my Jimmy were still flat, but otherwise life was suddenly back to normal. As normal as it gets for me, anyway.

  I took a shower and climbed into bed and slept for seven hours straight. When I woke up, I made a pot of coffee and walked outside and sat at the picnic table for a while. I’d already stopped wearing the sling for my arm.

  Laurie had left a message on my phone. She said she would meet me at Kelly’s at two, and that she had a surprise for me. A surprise! I couldn’t wait.

  There was also a message from Agent Sinclair. He said that Bradley Harbaugh had been arrested, and that I would most likely be called upon to give a deposition in the next couple of weeks. In other words, he wanted me to stay around town for a while. He said to give him a call first thing Monday morning.

  It was Saturday, October 25. Everett’s twentieth birthday. I hoped he was having a great time, wherever he was. He should have a great time on his birthday. Everyone should. Cake and all that. And he should enjoy his freedom while he could, because I doubted that it was going to last long. I had a feeling the FBI would catch up with him, eventually, once they bled some information out of his father. And I hoped they did catch up with him. Everett had conspired to steal twenty million dollars from Jill Drake-Harbaugh. His own mother. He deserved to be caught.

  It all boiled down to greed, really. And the sad thing about it—the ironic thing—was that Everett would have inherited the money eventually anyway. But he couldn’t wait. He had to have it now, and he had to get his mom back for keeping the big secret all these years, for not telling him that he’d been conceived in a sperm bank.

  I imagined Bradley Harbaugh had played a huge part in fanning those emotional flames, knowing that Everett was his ticket to big time wealth. Bradley was the smooth talker, the con man, the wheeler dealer, the brains of the outfit. Everett had been taken for a ride, but he was a grown man, capable of making his own decisions, and he deserved to be punished for what he’d done, right along with his dad and John Patterson. I hoped the FBI would catch him. The sooner the better.

  Actually, Everett probably wasn’t having a very good time for his birthday, even with all that money at his disposal. He was probably in panic mode by now, wondering why he hadn’t heard from his father.

  I sat there at the picnic table thinking about it all, sipping my coffee and enjoying the beautiful autumn day. I was about to go inside for a second cup when I saw Dylan Crawford climbing up the hill with a rod and reel in one hand and a cricket cage in the other. His new friend was walking beside him, the big yellow dog he’d named Bud. They finally made it up to my place, both of them panting a bit from the effort.

  “Catch anything?” I said.

  “Not even a bite.”

  “Have you ever tried Stinky Fingers?”

  He smelled his hand.

  “Huh?” he said.

  I laughed. “It’s a brand of artificial baits. I heard they’re really good.”

  “Oh. I was just using crickets. I’ll see if my dad will buy me some.”

  “Worth a try,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  I lit a cigarette. “Your dog’s looking better.”

  “I’m trying to teach him how to catch a Frisbee.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “He’ll catch it, but he won’t bring it back to me. He just drops it on the ground.”

  “He’ll learn,” I said.

  Dylan ran his fingers through Bud’s golden fur. “Why don’t you come on down and do some fishing with us?” he said.

  “Can’t. I have a date.”

  “With a girl?”

  “Yes, with a girl. Anything wrong with that?”

  “I guess not. All right, I’ll see ya.”

  “See ya, Dylan.”

  They turned around an
d started back down the hill.

  A boy and a dog and a fishing pole, I thought.

  What crisp clear October afternoons were made for.

  I drank two more cups of coffee, and then went inside and took a shower and got dressed and headed on over to Kelly’s. It’s a pool hall, but they have a couple of televisions, and I knew it would be a good place to watch the game. Laurie was already at the bar sipping on a frozen margarita when I walked in.

  I kissed her. “Good to see you,” I said.

  “You too. How did it go last night?”

  “Long story.”

  “That’s OK. I’m not going anywhere. I called in sick for tonight. So you can tell me all about it.”

  “You don’t look sick,” I said.

  “I’m not. Trust me.”

  “Won’t the manager be mad about having to cover for you?”

  “He’ll get over it,” she said. “So why did you want me to meet you here?”

  “I thought we could watch the game together.”

  “What game?” she said.

  “Game six of the World Series.”

  “Baseball?”

  “Yes, baseball. It’s what crisp clear October afternoons were made for. Along with boys and dogs and fishing poles, of course.”

  She laughed. “OK. I’ll watch the game with you. You want a drink?”

  “In a minute. Where’s the surprise you promised me?”

  “At my place. You’ll just have to come on over later if you want to see it.”

  “I guess I could do that,” I said. “You’re not going to give me a hint or anything?”

  “Nope.”

  We had some drinks and some food and watched baseball on TV, and I told Laurie about everything that had happened in Gainesville yesterday. She said my story was much more interesting than the game, but she didn’t know what she was talking about. Josh Beckett pitched a shutout for the Marlins. They scored two runs on seven hits, taking the trophy home for the first time in franchise history. My team won. They were the champions of the world!

  Laurie didn’t drink nearly as much as I did, so she insisted that I leave the Caprice at Kelly’s. I agreed that it would be a good idea. She drove us to her apartment, and she made me close my eyes when she turned into the parking lot.